The Kings of Pastry

Saw this tonight: a lovely documentary about three pastry chefs vieing for the MOF (Meilleurs Ouevriers de France--Best Craftsmen of France), the top honor for French chefs. Seriously top honor: if you're caught wearing the red white and blue collar without having earned it you can be prosecuted and wind up in jail. Actually, the film is about sixteen chefs, but they focus on three of them preparing for the challenge, and then competing. It puts anything you've ever seen on The Food Network to shame--three days with a strictly defined list of things they have to make: candies, a chocolate presentation, a sugar sculpture, a wedding cake. One of the crucial tests of the sugar sculpture (and the chef's cool) is that it has to be carried from the kitchen to the buffet where all the goodies are presented--and at any point that the damned things are moved they can, like, shatter into a bazillion pieces. Which happens more than once (and I flinched each time).

Really, if you like cooking or baking, or just want to look into a world you never knew was there, see this film. Just lovely.